Elena Marchetti: Why Sustainable Hospitality Is Now a Commercial Imperative

Elena Marchetti has been covering sustainable hospitality for Hospitality121 since the publication launched, and her perspective on the industry's progress is both more optimistic and more exacting than most. In this conversation, she explains why sustainability has moved from a brand differentiator to a baseline commercial requirement — and why many operators are still misjudging the transition.

The framing she uses is deliberately commercial. Sustainability in hospitality spent most of the last decade being positioned as a values play — something hotels did because it was right, or because a growing segment of guests rewarded it with loyalty. That framing, she argues, was always limiting and is now actively misleading. The drivers compelling hotels to decarbonise, reduce waste, and build transparent supply chains are no longer primarily guest preference or brand positioning. They are corporate travel policy, institutional investor requirement, regulatory obligation, and operating cost pressure. The conversation has moved from "why should we?" to "how fast can we?"

Marchetti is particularly direct about the gap between stated commitments and operational reality. The hospitality industry has produced a substantial number of net-zero pledges and sustainability roadmaps over the past five years. What it has produced far less of is the granular operational change — in procurement, in building management, in supply chain — that these commitments require. The properties she most respects are those that are doing the less glamorous work: measuring their scope 3 emissions with genuine rigour, renegotiating supplier contracts to enforce sustainability standards, and investing in building upgrades that reduce energy consumption rather than just purchasing offsets.

The food waste question comes up repeatedly in her reporting, and she singles it out as one of the most significant and most tractable sustainability challenges in hospitality. The average hotel restaurant wastes a proportion of its food purchase that would be considered unacceptable in virtually any other operating context, and the technology to measure and reduce this waste is widely available and relatively affordable. The constraint is not capability — it is the management attention to treat food waste as a serious operational metric rather than an unavoidable cost of the hospitality business.

Marchetti closes on what she expects the next five years to look like. The properties that will be in the strongest competitive position by the end of the decade are those that are building sustainability into their operating model now — not as a compliance exercise, but as a source of genuine cost efficiency, brand differentiation, and resilience. The intersection of regulation, institutional capital, and guest expectation is creating a trajectory that one-off initiatives and annual sustainability reports will not be sufficient to navigate. The organisations treating this as a transformation rather than a reporting exercise are the ones she expects to win.

What is the most common mistake you see hotels making on sustainability?

Buying offsets before doing the hard work of reduction. Offsets have a legitimate role at the margin, but using them to claim net-zero while the underlying emissions profile is unchanged is a strategy that is running out of runway. The corporate travel buyers who are setting sustainability requirements for hotel procurement are becoming sophisticated about this distinction. They want to see reduction, not just neutralisation.

Where do you see the most genuine progress?

In building management and energy systems — partly because the ROI is clearest and partly because the technology has improved dramatically. Hotels that have invested in smart building management systems and moved to renewable energy contracts are seeing meaningful reductions in both cost and emissions, and these are permanent structural changes rather than one-cycle wins.

What would you say to an operator who feels overwhelmed by where to start?

Measure first. You cannot manage what you do not measure, and the measurement frameworks for hospitality sustainability — energy, water, waste, food — are mature enough that there is no excuse for not having a baseline. Start with the data, identify the highest-impact areas, and build from there. The complexity comes later. The starting point is simpler than most operators assume.